The De Cote winery in Querétaro, whose 2016 Atempo merlot was a grand gold medal winner at the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles.
Mexican wineries are having a banner year in terms of international competitions: so far in 2020, 74 wines have won awards at three international events.
At the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles, which wrapped up September 8 in Brno, Czech Republic, Mexico took home 59 medals. De Cote Winery’s 2016 Atempo merlot and Pozo de Luna’s 2015 malbec were named Grand Gold Medal winners out of 8,500 wines from 46 countries. Decote is located in Querétaro and Pozo de Luna in San Luis Potosí.
At Spain’s Concurso Internacional de Vinos Bacchus, more than 1,500 wines were tasted by a jury of 100 winemakers, masters of wine, masters of sommelier and journalists.
Thirteen Mexican wines won awards in the competition, which took place in March in Madrid, including four medals for Casa Madero, located in Coahuila, and three for Baja California’s Monte Xanic. The latter winery took home the competition’s top prize for its 2017 Ricardo Bordeaux blend.
In France, meanwhile, the Don Leo 2013 Cabernet Sauvignon Gran Reserva took first place and was named best cabernet sauvignon in the world at the International Cabernet Competition, in which French sommeliers blind-tasted wines from 25 countries.
Harvest time at Monte Xanic in Baja California.
The Coahuila winery’s 2016 cabernet sauvignon/shiraz also took home the gold at the same competition. Although the 2013 cabernet was already sold out by the time news of the win hit in June, the shiraz blend can still be found online for 625 pesos (US $29).
The Decanter World Wine Awards, which occur every August and are sponsored by Decanter magazine, will announce their winners on September 22.
The event, billed as the “world’s largest and most influential wine competition,” brings together wines from 50 countries which are judged by 280 world-renowned experts.
Last year Mexican wines took home 23 awards, and it is likely more Mexican wines will get their due as the country’s renewed interest in quality winemaking has given Mexican vintages international clout.
It has been a long time coming. The first vines in Mexico were planted in 1521 but as Mexican wine began to outshine Spanish wine, the king of Spain banned its production except for religious purposes in 1699.
And despite its long history, the modern wine industry in Mexico is just beginning to come into its own. In 2005 there were 25 wineries in all of Mexico. Today, in Baja California alone, where the first vines were planted in 1683, there are upwards of 120, mostly small wineries producing world-class vintages. Wine is also produced in seven other Mexican states.
Cristina Pino Villar, winemaker for Santo Tomás in Baja California, says the emergence of high-quality wines in Mexico is due to two factors, “the professionalization of the industry — leading-edge technology in the wineries and vineyards, quality lab analyses, hiring experienced winemakers — and also that so many vineyards have decades of age, bringing complexity in a natural way,” she says. “We’re writing the story of Mexican vitiviniculture, and there are still a lot of blank pages left to fill.”
CORRECTION: Incorrect information regarding the De Cote Winery appeared under the main photo in the earlier version of this story. The winery is located in Querétaro, not Coahuila.
Ancira, left, claims López Obrador's accusations violate due process and the presumption of innocence.
The owner and president of a steel company who was detained in Spain last year on corruption charges is suing President López Obrador for defaming him at his morning news conferences.
Raymundo Riva Palacio, a columnist at the newspaper El Financiero, said that Alonso Ancira, president of Altos Hornos de México (AHMSA), filed a complaint against the president in a Mexico City administrative court on Wednesday.
According to Riva, Ancira claims that López Obrador has violated 10 articles of the constitution and one of the American Convention on Human Rights by making unfounded accusations against him at his weekday pressers.
In his complaint, the AHMSA chief, who has previously claimed that Mexico is a country without laws, said the president’s remarks against him amount to a “continuous public lynching” and that López Obrador has also made declarations designed to intimidate judges.
“The power held by the president … has a reach of enormous magnitude and the declarations he has made imply a threat to national judges,” the complaint said.
Verbal attacks and accusations are frequent at the president’s morning press conference.
The likelihood that the principle of judicial independence will be upheld is “seriously diminished” by the president’s statements, it added.
Riva wrote in a column published Friday that the complaint filed by Ancira, who was detained in Spain in May 2019 in connection with the 2015 sale of a fertilizer plant to Pemex, refers to remarks López Obrador made after the chief of Mexico’s largest steelmaker obtained a ruling against a warrant for his arrest that had been sought by the federal Attorney General’s Office.
Ancira obtained the favorable decision on August 13 from a Chiapas court that ruled that the charge against him – that he conducted operations with resources of illicit origin – had expired, the El Financiero columnist said.
After the ruling was handed down, López Obrador began making remarks that Ancira considers slanderous.
The president declared that the AHMSA chief is guilty of the charges of which he is accused — his case is linked to that against former Pemex CEO Emilio Lozoya – and suggested that he obtained the ruling from the Chiapas court in an “irregular way.”
According to Ancira’s complaint, López Obrador made a series of remarks between August 20 and September 4 that implied he was guilty even though he hasn’t been put before a court.
His public statements violate due process and the presumption of innocence and hinder Ancira’s ability to access to “impartial justice,” according to the complaint against the president. López Obrador’s remarks are “clearly detrimental” to the AHMSA chief’s human rights, it said.
The complaint also asks a judge to respond to 17 different questions related to the legal problems Ancira faces.
Among them: what kind of actions can violate the principle of judicial independence? Can a statement by the president that ‘all judges who rule in Ancira’s favor will be investigated’ be considered external pressure on the judiciary? What is the limit to the president’s freedom of expression? What is the reach of the principle of the separation of powers?
Riva wrote in his column that the complaint filed against López Obrador transcends Ancira’s case because it seeks answers to questions that will determine whether verbal attacks and accusations the president has made against dozens of people, groups and institutions were legal.
He wrote that López Obrador uses his morning press conferences, colloquially referred to as mañaneras in Spanish, for propagandistic purposes and to divert attention from “burning issues.”
“In his responses [to reporters’ questions] he tends to make accusations without proof [and] to lie about or defame individuals, groups, companies and institutions,” Riva said.
Columnist Riva: ‘The president tends to make accusations without proof and to lie about or defame individuals, groups, companies and institutions.’
On Friday, the president took aim at the Reforma newspaper, one of his favorite targets, accusing it of being unethical because it published a story about corruption that hasn’t been proven.
It remains to be seen what will come of the complaint filed by Ancira, who remains in Spain although his extradition to Mexico was approved in May.
But it seems improbable that López Obrador will be hauled before a court and even less likely that he would be found guilty of slander.
The president is not the only member of the federal government who has been accused of making out-of-place remarks against people facing criminal charges.
The attorney general declined to name the people to which he was referring but added that “we all know” who they are.
One of the people Gertz Manero is believed to have been referring to is Santiago Nieto, head of the government’s Financial Intelligence Unit.
Speaking at López Obrador’s mañaneras, Nieto has revealed details of cases against high-profile figures including Lozoya (the former state oil company chief), ex-cabinet secretary Rosario Robles and Pemex workers’ union leader Carlos Romero Deschamps.
During his lengthy morning pressers, the president himself has leveled accusations at past presidents including Felipe Calderón, who defeated him at the 2006 election.
López Obrador said last month that Mexico was a narco-state during the Calderón administration given the given the evidence that has been coming out against his security minister Genaro García Luna, who is awaiting trial in the United States on charges he took bribes from and colluded with the Sinaloa Cartel.
But despite frequently railing against his predecessors, the president says that he doesn’t support prosecuting them because he favors looking to the future rather than dwelling on the past.
Nevertheless, he supports the plan to hold a referendum to ask the public whether past presidents should face justice and has pledged that they will be held to account if that is the majority’s wish.
Rubin: while Canada is more expensive, it's safer for investment.
The president of the American Society of Mexico has warned that United States investors will look to Canada if the Mexican government continues to change the rules of the game and doesn’t respect existing contracts.
Speaking Friday at a virtual event organized by the Confederation of Chambers of Commerce, Services and Tourism (Concanaco), Larry Rubin said the new North American trade agreement, the USMCA, will lead to greater United States investment in the region.
However, U.S. investment in Mexico will depend on the policies the Mexican government implements or doesn’t implement, he said.
Rubin said that board members of companies in New York, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles watch events as they unfold in Mexico and that they will take note if public consultations involving U.S. companies are held or if established agreements between the private sector and the government are changed.
The government has already canceled a brewery project that was under construction by U.S. beverage company Constellation Brands in Mexicali, Baja California, after a consultation in March found that 76% of participants opposed it.
Rubin said that “enormous caution” is needed because the decisions the government makes today will have a “very significant” impact on the decisions investors make in the future.
“Mexico is not alone in the USMCA, it’s competing for United States investment with Canada. So if Mexico doesn’t get its act together and do things better, investors will naturally decide to go to Canada, which despite being more expensive is safer for investment,” he said.
Rubin said that Mexico urgently needs to send signals that the rule of law is respected and that United States investors will be respected 100%.
A group of “local rebel politicians” shouldn’t be able to stand in the way of a project because they didn’t receive a bribe or other benefit, he said.
“We have to be very careful because investment, like a swallow, flies away and leaves. There is room to do things better in terms of looking after commerce in Mexico,” Rubin said.
Speaking at the same event, Concanaco president José Manuel López Campos said that legal certainty and security are fundamental factors in generating investor confidence. Insecurity and an absence of the rule of law inhibits the capacity to attract new investment, he said.
The Mexicali brewery whose completion was halted after a public referendum.
It noted that the approval of the USMCA provided “a boost in confidence to investors hoping for continued and deepening regional economic integration.”
The State Department also noted that President López Obrador has expressed optimism that the trade pact’s entry into force on July 1 this year “will buoy the Mexican economy.”
“Still,” the statement continued, “investors report regulatory changes, the shaky financial health of the state oil company Pemex, and a perceived weak fiscal response to the Covid-19 economic crisis have contributed to ongoing uncertainties.”
The State Department also said that “uncertainty about contract enforcement, insecurity, informality, and corruption also continue to hinder Mexican economic growth.”
“These factors raise the cost of doing business in Mexico,” it added.
Despite the barriers to doing business, Mexico became the United States’ top trading partner in goods in 2019 and remains one of its “most important investment partners,” the State Department said.
“Bilateral trade grew 654% 1993-2019, and Mexico is the United States’ second largest export market and third largest trading partner,” the Investment Climate Statement said.
“The United States is Mexico’s top source of foreign direct investment with US $114.9 billion (2018 total per the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis) or 39.7% of all inflows to Mexico.”
A rebozo is made on a backstrap loom at the Feria de Rebozo in Tenancingo, México state. Alejandro Linares García
On September 16, Mexican Independence Day, millions of women dig out the rebozos in their closets to wear with genuine pride. But this yearly ritual also demonstrates an ambivalence that many Mexicans have about their heritage.
The rebozo is a garment that much of the world connects to Mexico, even if they do not know its name. In the past century or so, it was prominently worn by famous women like artist Frida Kahlo, actress María Félix and more recently singer Lila Downs and former Mexican first lady Margarita Zavala.
Its mexicanidad has been reinforced in Mexican cinema, television, and children’s songs to the present day.
It is a flat, rectangular garment that looks like a cross between a scarf and a shawl. It is made from cloth specifically woven for the purpose, with the loose fringes on both ends often tied in intricate knots. It is traditionally wrapped around the upper body and may cover the head as well.
Depending on the fiber, thickness, and decoration, it can be used to protect the wearer from the sun and/or the cold, or simply be an accessory. Rebozos, especially in the past, could be as long as four meters, but today most are around 1.5.
Rebozos on display at the shop inside the rebozo school in Santa María del Río, San Luis Potosí. Alejandro Linares García
The Spanish name comes from “rebozar” meaning to cover or envelope, and the garment has many other names from Mexico’s indigenous languages. It is not indigenous, but rather emerged in the early colonial period, prominent first among lower-class mestizo women, and is a combination of indigenous, European, and Asian textile traditions.
From the colonial period through the 19th century, it had the important purpose of preserving women’s modesty by covering the hair and deemphasizing the bosom.
The use of the garment spread into indigenous communities, and “upward” to women of higher social rank. This led to wide variation in fibers, decoration, and even fringe treatment. By the 19th century, even the Empress Carlota of the Second Mexican Empire wore one on occasion, cementing it as an essential garment for all Mexican women at the time. This was the height of the garment’s status.
This status took a hit during the Porfirian era (late 19th and very early 20th century) when modernization was emphasized along with anything French. This was followed by the Mexican Revolution, when women revolutionaries called “Adelitas,” not only wore rebozos to show they were not part of the elite, but also to hide weapons from authorities.
It is the images of these women captured by foreign correspondents that created the garment’s current appeal, reinforced by Mexican and U.S. movies some decades later. It was iconic Mexico, but again associated with lower-class and indigenous rural women, not modern ones.
The use of the rebozo fell to the point that now it is quite rare to see one in any of Mexico’s major cities. To see rebozos in the street regularly, it is necessary to go into Mexico’s traditional rural communities in states such as Michoacán, Oaxaca and Chiapas, along with parts of Guanajuato, Puebla and Tlaxcala.
Angahuan rebozo with outfit designed to match at the Michoacán Rebozo Fashion Show, part of the Tianguis de Domingo de Ramo. Alejandro Linares García
Because of climate, they tend to be found in mountain communities rather than on the hot and humid coasts. The main rebozo makers are found mostly in these same states, in part because the design and materials of rebozos are tied to specific communities.
Rebozos range from monotone in simple or complicated weaves (often called chalinas) to those with intricate woven and/or dyed patterns, and/or embroidery. Fringe knotting can be extremely complicated as well, generally done by women who specialize in this.
There are three towns particularly noted for making rebozos. Santa María de Río, San Luis Potosí, is known for extremely fine silk rebozos, so thin that the best can be threaded through a wedding ring. Tenancingo, México state, is known for cotton rebozos with patterns created through ikat, an Asian dyeing method.
The threads are dyed, not the entire garment, and it is not possible to see the pattern until the rebozo is woven. La Piedad, Michoacán, stands out because it has several major businesses/cooperatives producing in quantity for the surrounding region.
During the rebozo’s height of popularity, sophisticated versions took months of work, with elements such as the finest fibers, gold and silver thread, beads, intricate embroidery, and more. These rebozos were family heirlooms, often given as gifts for special occasions. At one point it was given to a woman instead of an engagement ring. It is still possible to find or order such treasures, but it is rare and becoming rarer.
Even today, a “true” rebozo is woven on a pedal or backstrap loom at the very least. It is absolutely never cut from a commercial bolt of cloth. Although cheap acrylic machine woven versions can be had for 100-200 pesos, handwoven rebozos can easily run into the thousands of pesos.
Heavily embroidered rebozo from Acatlán de Osorio, Guerrero. Alejandro Linares García
It is said that wearing a rebozo makes a woman more feminine, but the garment can be quite practical and is used to carry children and bundles. The child or bundle is placed on the woman’s back (men never do this), and the rebozo is wrapped around both, tied at the chest, over the shoulder, or across the forehead.
In the most conservative areas of Mexico, the rebozo retains its modesty function with women’s heads and torsos wrapped, especially in church.
The rural/indigenous/”backward” symbolism of the garment which (re)attached with the Revolution creates a kind of conundrum for modern city women in Mexico. They were raised with the values of the Revolution, but the urge to be part of the modern, globalized world is strong.
For these women, they will buy at least one, but its wearing is reserved only for when she wants to make a statement with it at civic or cultural functions — hence its use on September 16.
The drop in demand for rebozos means that many types have disappeared over the past decades and more are on the brink. There have been efforts to preserve and promote making and wearing rebozos, such as weaving contests and fairs, especially in September (at least in normal times without Covid-19).
Contemporary fashion designers have taken on the garment as well, both creating more contemporary decoration as well as finding new ways to wear it.
Rebozo created by Rosa Pasqual Bautista of Aihuirán, Michoacán, on display at the Feria de Rebozo in Tenancingo. Alejandro Linares García
Leigh Thelmadatter arrived in Mexico 17 years ago and fell in love with the land and the culture. She publishes a blog called Creative Hands of Mexicoand her first book, Mexican Cartonería: Paper, Paste and Fiesta, was published last year. Her culture blog appears weekly on Mexico News Daily.
For many graduates, their salaries don't meet their expectations.
Graduates of public and private universities earn an average of around 10,400 pesos (US $490) a month, a study by the Universidad del Valle de México (UVM) has found, with women earning 22% less than men.
UVM’s National Survey of Graduates 2020 interviewed 10,036 students about their professional trajectory after graduating from college.
The study is intended to help authorities formulate public policies to align higher education with the economic and social needs of the country and help universities design an updated educational offering based on market needs.
This in turn is to help students choose their field of study based on updated information on demand for skills, employability and income.
And as in previous years, the disparity between male and female graduates continues to be noticeable as men are still better paid, have better benefits and are more employable than women in Mexico. In their first job after graduation, 27% of men were paid more than 8,000 pesos (US $376) a month, compared to just 18% of women.
Salaries across the board were not what many students hoped for: 54% of those surveyed said they were not earning what they had expected.
Only 17% of all graduates earned more than 15,000 pesos per month, and 5% said they earned less than 1,500 pesos, the survey found.
Private university graduates say mechanical engineering and metallurgy careers are the best paid with an average salary of 16,394 pesos per month.
Of those who attended a public university, chemistry majors were the best paid at 13,465 pesos per month.
Graduates are also finding it increasingly difficult to find work. In 2005, the study found that 40% of those interviewed found it difficult or very difficult to find a job after leaving school. In 2019 that number jumped to 56.5%.
One-third of study participants said they pursued a college education to improve their standard of living, while 27% said they went to college because they enjoyed their field of study.
Students tend to stay in the same state in which they studied, with only 17% moving elsewhere after graduation, and four out of 10 surveyed said they worked while going to school
Social sciences, administration and law (35%) and engineering, manufacturing and construction (25%) were the areas of study with the highest number of graduates, followed by health-related degrees at 12%, natural and computer sciences with 10%, and education or the arts and humanities 6%.
Not surprisingly, only 24% of arts and humanities graduates found work in their fields, whereas 74% of those who studied a health-related field were able to find related work.
Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco has won the Leoncino d’Oro Award at the Venice Film Festival for Nuevo Orden, a film depicting a dystopian version of Mexico in the not-so-distant future.
The honor is one of several collateral awards at the festival and was presented by the Youth Jury, composed of 28 film-lovers between 18 and 25 from each of the countries in the European Union. The film is also in contention for the prestigious Golden Lion grand prize, which will be awarded Saturday evening.
Franco is no stranger to the awards stage. New Order, as the film is called in English, is his sixth feature film as director. Previous efforts have also won him prizes on the international film festival circuit, including a best screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival for the 2015 film Chronic starring Tim Roth, and a Cannes Jury Prize for April’s Daughter in 2017.
New Order, which stars Diego Boneta, Naian González Norvind, Mónica del Carmen and Dario Yazbek Bernal, tells a tale of inequalities and political and social conflicts as the upper class in Mexico is replaced by a militaristic regime. It delves into racism, classism, poverty and wealth in ways that are uncomfortably reflective of the current unrest in several parts of the world, critics say.
The film opens with an opulent party for the wedding of an upper-class couple from Mexico City, which is interrupted when a legion of desperate people massacre the guests, marking the beginning of an insurrection in the streets that ends in a violent military coup that plunges the country into fascism.
Teaser trailer de Nuevo orden — New Order subtitulado en inglés (HD)
Unflinching cinematography depicts shocking and brutal scenes of assaults, rapes, executions, torture, blackmail and corruption.
“It’s a dystopian movie to say, ‘Let’s not get there,'” Franco, 41, explained.
Reviews have been universally positive so far.
“Audiences might conceivably be divided on the vicious gut-punch of Franco’s approach, but as a call for more equitable distribution of wealth and power, it’s terrifyingly riveting,” the Hollywood Reporter writes.
“At its heart, it argues that social inequality is presently so great that violence is inevitable. It’s set in Mexico, but it could be anywhere,” says Cineuropa.
The film was screened Thursday night and drew a standing ovation from the audience and critics. The following morning Franco learned he had received the Youth Jury prize, and by this afternoon, Mexico time, he will know if New Order will be awarded the Golden Lion.
“You never should think about awards because you will be disappointed if they don’t happen,” Franco says. “I’m already happy seeing how things went and I hear that the film is considered daring and strong; they say that it is my most commercial film with a universal theme.”
After Venice, Franco goes to the San Sebastián Festival in Spain September 18.
Eight states have been assessed at medium risk for the coronavirus. milenio
For the first time since the federal government introduced its stoplight system to assess the risk of coronavirus infection, none of Mexico’s 32 federal entities will be classified as a “red light” maximum risk state as of Monday.
The Health Ministry’s director of health promotion, Ricardo Cortés, announced Friday that as of Monday there will be eight “yellow light” medium risk states and 24 “orange light” high risk ones.
For a two-week period starting September 14, Campeche, Chiapas, Chihuahua, Morelos, Quintana Roo, Sonora, Tamaulipas and Tlaxcala will be yellow light states.
The risk level was downgraded from orange to yellow in Morelos and Quintana Roo while the other six states are already at the medium risk level.
Coronavirus cases and deaths reported by day. milenio
The government of Quintana Roo has established its own guidelines to determine which coronavirus restrictions can be eased and when and as a result downgraded the risk level in the northern half of the Caribbean coast state at the start of this week, a move that allowed beaches, gyms and archaeological sites to reopen at reduced capacity.
Of the 24 states that will be orange as of Monday, four – Tabasco, Oaxaca, Guerrero and Veracruz – are currently yellow while one, Colima, is red.
Cortés said that the infection risk level had decreased in Colima but increased in Tabasco, Oaxaca, Guerrero and Veracruz, according to the stoplight system, which considers 10 different indicators to determine the stoplight color allocated to each state.
The 10 indicators are:
The Covid-19 effective reproduction rate (how many people each infected person infects);
Estimated case numbers per 100,000 inhabitants;
The weekly positivity rate (the percentage of Covid-19 tests that come back positive);
Total case numbers;
The number of coronavirus patients per 100,000 inhabitants;
Hospital occupancy rates for general care beds;
Hospital occupancy rates for beds with ventilators;
Hospital admission trends;
Covid-19 mortality rate (deaths per 100,000 inhabitants); and
Covid-19 death trends (whether the number of deaths per week is increasing or decreasing).
Mexico continues to record thousands of new coronavirus cases every day and hundreds of Covid-19 deaths but Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell, who’s leading the government’s pandemic response, said last week that it was possible that the vast majority of the 32 states could switch to green light “low” risk by the end of the month.
The government’s strategy to combat the pandemic was heavily criticized this week by six former health ministers who outlined in a report a range of ways to “correct” the course, which included ramping up coronavirus testing and making face masks mandatory across the country.
López-Gatell, who has played down the importance of testing and been a somewhat reluctant advocate of mask use, mocked the “illustrious ex-ministers,” saying ironically that they should patent their “innovative” formula.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s accumulated tally of confirmed coronavirus case increased to 658,299 on Friday with 5,935 new cases registered. The Health Ministry estimates that there are 41,025 active cases across the country while the results of 87,210 tests are not yet known.
The official Covid-19 death toll passed 70,000 on Friday with an additional 534 Covid-19 fatalities reported. Confirmed deaths now total 70,183, the fourth highest tally in the world after the United States, Brazil and India.
'It's a trashy publication, without ethics,
professionalism or scruples,' president says of the newspaper.
President López Obrador delivered a scathing rebuke of the newspaper Reforma on Friday after it published a story on its front page about the alleged embezzlement of 223 million pesos (US $10.5 million) by members of the government in the municipality where he was born.
Published under the headline “223 million pesos disappear in AMLO’s homeland,” the report said that the Tabasco state Congress repudiated the Morena party government of Macuspana after it detected the missing funds and replaced it with a three-member municipal council.
Reforma reported that the mayor of Macuspana, located about 50 kilometers southeast of Tabasco, and more than 20 members of the municipal government, including López Obrador’s sister-in-law, resigned last week as a result of their alleged corruption being uncovered.
Speaking at his morning news conference on Friday, the president criticized Reforma for publishing the story because the alleged corruption hasn’t been proven.
López Obrador said his communications coordinator had spoken with Tabasco Governor Adán Augusto López, who also represents the ruling Morena party, and that he confirmed that the resignation of the Macuspana mayor and other members of the council was not related to the alleged corruption.
“There is not yet any embezzlement declared by the state auditor’s office nor by the [Tabasco] Congress,” López Obrador said.
He called Reforma a “trashy publication” and a “bulletin of conservatism” and charged that the newspaper is a protector and sponsor of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, widely considered one of Mexico’s most corrupt presidents.
López Obrador stressed that his criticism was of the highest echelons of Reforma not its reporters and press workers.
The president took aim at the Mexico City-based broadsheet for suggesting that he was involved with the alleged wrongdoings of his sister-in-law, who was the municipal trustee, noting that they published a photo of him with her.
“It’s a classic case of underworld journalism,” he said.
“Reforma is a bulletin of conservatism, … it has no scruples. It’s a trashy publication, without ethics, without professionalism. Imagine … dedicating eight columns to something that is not proven. … Don’t go and say tomorrow that I’m defending my sister-in-law or that … I’m attacking free speech. I’ve said with complete clarity [that] if any family member [of mine] commits a crime, he or she must be prosecuted, whoever it is,” López Obrador said.
“The people don’t want cronyism, nepotism, none of those blights of politics. … Imagine if I’d protected my family members, the council [of Macuspana] wouldn’t have disappeared.”
The president claimed that the real reason why Reforma published its story about corruption in his native Tabasco was to sully his name. “This is vile journalism, … as they are conservatives and very hypocritical … they act in an immoral way.”
López Obrador has criticized the newspaper frequently since he took office in late 2018, asserting that it is part of the prensa fifi, or elitist press, and a bearer of neoliberalism, which he derides as the cause of many of Mexico’s problems.
Staff members at the state workers (ISSSTE) hospital in La Paz, Baja California Sur (BCS), are denouncing health protocol violations that they say put patients at risk for exposure to the coronavirus.
A complaint sent to the Metropolimex news agency said coronavirus patients are mixed with people who are at El Conchalito hospital for other ailments.
The letter said ISSSTE hospitals across the state are poorly organized and are lacking federal support.
“More than 100 ISSSTE health workers have tested positive for the SARS-COV-2 virus due to mismanagement and the faulty hygiene control that is needed to prevent the spread of the disease in the hospital,” one of the doctors said.
The hospital’s medical, administrative and cleaning staff requested the intervention of the state’s Ministry of Health and Senator Víctor Castro Cosio, who was recently discharged from the same hospital after testing positive for Covid-19.
• In Los Cabos, executive president of the hotel association, Lilzi Orcí, reported that not a single tourist has tested positive for the coronavirus, thanks in part to strict protocols for both guests and staff that hoteliers are following. Massive testing of hotel personnel has helped detect workers who are positive but asymptomatic so that they can safely self-isolate, she said.
• Tourism among the extremely wealthy has diminished during the coronavirus pandemic, but not as much as one might think, BCS Noticias reports.
According to statistics from the Los Cabos Tourism Trust (Fiturca), 19,871 tourists traveled to Los Cabos in private planes between January and June, a 33% drop compared to the same period in 2019. However, things are picking up. In June, 2,336 passengers arrived in private planes, just 16.2% below 2019 levels. Between January and June, 23,745 commercial passengers arrived at the Los Cabos International airport.
• As of Thursday, BCS had recorded 8,620 accumulated cases of the coronavirus and 400 deaths.
Beaches full, theaters empty
During the first week beaches in La Paz reopened, hundreds of citizens vied for their piece of sand, sometimes waiting hours to be admitted to popular sunbathing spots such as Balandra and Tecolote beaches. Rows of cars lined the entrances well before the beaches opened at 11 a.m. Some cars started queuing up at 6 a.m. to make the 30% capacity cutoff.
It’s not the same for theaters, though. Theater companies would be glad if would-be beach-goers decided to trade their day at the beach for a day at the movies.
Cinemas in the state are now allowed open at 40% capacity, but they are having trouble filling just 10% of their seats, BCS Noticias reports.
A manager at Cinemex in San José del Cabos said attendance has been drastically low, at just 7% capacity during the week with 15% on weekends.
Funeral business booming
Pre-pandemic, a funeral home in San José del Cabo said it would conduct around 15 services a month; now they are doing as many as 30 services every two weeks.
In 2019, 136 people died in the municipality. As of September 8, 199 people have died in 2020, and at least 50% from the coronavirus.
Per the state’s Ministry of Health, bodies must be buried or cremated as soon as possible, and visitation is not permitted. When someone dies, the body goes directly to the crematorium or the cemetery. Burials cost around 20,000 pesos (US $940), and cremations around 15,000 (US $705).
Despite the uptick in business, the unnamed funeral service said they are not offering any coronavirus specials, BCS Noticias reports.
Los Arcos up for auction
La Paz’s once famed Hotel Los Arcos will be auctioned off to pay debts owed to its former employees, Diario El Independiente reports. Five buildings owned by the Coppola family will be sold after members of the BCS Gastronomic Union won a series of injunctions against their employers.
Employees of the hotel have been on strike since November 2008 and have been unable to reach an agreement with the owners, pioneer hoteliers in the state.
The debt owed the 78 employees is around 120 million pesos (US $5.6 million), representing 12 years of lost wages. The auction of the emblematic waterfront hotel, which was built in the 1930s, should take place within the next six months.
Iconic Hotel Los Arcos to go on auction block.
Sea lions die mysteriously
Around 150 decomposing sea lions were found washed up on the shore last week in Cabo San Lázaro, Excélsior reports.
This could be one of the largest mass deaths of the protected species in Mexico.
Last Friday three environmental inspectors from Mexico City were sent to investigate the deaths and take samples for laboratory testing.
At first, it was thought that the sea lions could have died due to the presence of red tide, but there have been no alerts for toxic algae blooms in the region.
Marine mammal experts told Excélsior that the sea lions may have been trapped in large tuna nets.
The Gulf of Ulloa region is known for the thousands of loggerhead turtles who have died over the years after becoming entangled in fishing nets, nearly causing the United States to impose a trade embargo on Mexico in 2015.
Caught
Fishermen suspected of carrying illegally caught clams attempted to flee the National Guard after a patrol pulled them over on Tuesday in Puerto San Carlos.
The men, driving a red pickup pulling a panga, drove away at a rapid rate of speed and the patrol unit gave chase, ramming the truck on its left side, which caused it to flip over. The crash occurred in a neighborhood where residents helped the suspects hide from the officers.
Eventually, one of the suspects and his illegal clams were taken into custody.
And a man in the Navarro Rubio neighborhood of La Paz was caught with 2,200 doses of illicit drugs, the Attorney General’s Office reported. The search of a house turned up 2,125 doses of methamphetamine and 100 doses of marijuana. A 27-year-old was taken into custody.
Award-winning interactive app for studying the solar system in your living room.
The appearance of Covid-19 has forced almost all the world’s schools to switch to remote learning. For many of them this may have been quite a challenge, but not for Luis Medina, director of Guadalajara’s IMI College.
“It was no problem,” Medina told me. “It took only an hour to make the switch and things are going really well. Instead of firing teachers, I had to hire more staff.”
Not only is the college coping during the pandemic but, according to Medina, “Students are learning better than ever and they love it.”
Medina’s school is one of a network of over 150 Knotion schools, founded in Morelia, Michoacán, which have replaced traditional textbooks, teachers and curricula with iPads, coaches and a monthly challenge that transforms students into investigators and researchers.
“Knotion schools, which have spread from Mexico to Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia and El Salvador, have a complete technological and pedagogic infrastructure for distance learning, so our students can achieve 100% academic success even if they’re quarantined at home,” said Medina.
Luis and Lucy Medina receive award for continuous innovation in learning and teaching.
Mexico’s public schools would like to see similar results from their nationwide program to teach via television and YouTube. They use music, animation, puppets and dynamic, attractive instructors but, suggests Medina, they still follow the traditional lecture approach where the teacher is omniscient, a walking encyclopedia, and the student is expected to be a sponge with “no creativity, no critical thought, no different ideas — in fact no ideas at all.”
Private schools in Mexico are also having a tough time dealing with remote learning. “Their problem,” says Medina, “is that they had long been looking at technology as the enemy of education. They saw cell phones as distractions, social networks as competition and the internet as full of lies. Now they are putting a camera in front of a white board, but it’s still the teacher explaining away and the student is still expected to regurgitate a summary of the teacher’s wisdom.”
This isn’t the way people learn, points out Medina, and as a result the children turn to parents to explain what they didn’t learn from the teacher. The parent reacts by saying “Hey, wait a minute! Why am I paying the school to educate my children when I have to do it myself? I’m working here from home and I can see that my kids aren’t learning. I’m not going to pay the full tuition anymore.”
This notion, says Medina, is now spreading all over Mexico exponentially … and has given rise to the creation of micro schools. A group of families hire a teacher (and there are tons of them out there with no job) who goes to one of the homes and works with six or eight kids of mixed levels, charging much more money than that teacher could ever earn in a normal school. “Of course,” adds Medina, “they’ve worked it out so the kids will get credit for those classes.”
The newspaper Excélsior reports that 25% of the private schools in Mexico have already shut down permanently and 40% of the public schools are closing their doors. The private colleges can’t pay rent, maintenance, etc. At the same time, they can’t fire their teachers because they would have to give them decades of severance pay. So their only choice is to declare bankruptcy.
“What this means,” comments Luis Medina, “is that just here in the state of Jalisco, 10,000 teachers will be unemployed — and things will be getting much worse in the next few months.”
Happy parents and students at IMI College in Guadalajara.
At IMI College things are quite different. “We’ve never had parents complaining that their children aren’t learning. One reason is because our teachers no longer operate as teachers, but rather as coaches or facilitators. The kids check their instructions for the day’s activities and the coach tells them what they will be trying to accomplish. Then everybody puts their shoulder to the wheel!”
Medina tells his teachers they should think of both themselves and the students as apprentices. “The students don’t have to wait for the teacher to tell them what’s what. Instead, the students and the teachers pose questions, just the way Socrates did. If you ask Google the state capitals, you’ll find them immediately, but if you ask Google a really deep question, a question that invites reflection and critical thinking, you’re not going to get a quick and simple answer.”
What do parents see when their children are learning remotely? Says Medina: “They see their child talking and participating, not sitting there listening to a teacher drone on. No, that child is working with his companions; they are sharing their findings; they are saying, ‘I’ll take the photos and you’ll do the editing and Bernardo will publish it on social media.’
“They know how to dialog, how to communicate, how to resolve problems. So the parents find their kids are no longer complaining that they’re not learning, but quite the opposite: they see their kids totally involved. Instead of asking their parents to explain something, they’re saying, ‘Hey Mom and Dad, I’m investigating water consumption and I think we should try to participate in this challenge, to see if we can reduce the amount of water we use at home. I want to look at our old water bills to see how many cubic meters we’re using and then I’ll document the changes we’ll be making month by month and I’m going to publish all of it on the web.’”
“The parent hears this and says, ‘Wow, my little girl is taking action!’ And all this may be tied to a study of mathematics: maybe they are studying volume, how to transform milliliters into cubic meters. So this is math, but math applied to life.”
Medina says his students are learning a lot from a system called Augmented Reality. On the screen of their iPad they see things in their environment such as a table or a sofa, but the image is enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information. On their table they may see a detailed representation of a river cutting its way through a landscape. They may now be asked to plan the construction of a dam on the river. By trial and error they discover that placing the dam at one point might produce great benefits or huge problems, and they can see the results of their choices with their own eyes.
[soliloquy id="122513"]
Augmented Reality makes it easy for IMI students to study chemistry, physics or biology right at home. “This week,” Medina told me, “our seventh-graders were dissecting a virtual frog. They open their iPad and there they see the frog on their desk. Then they anesthetize it and use a scalpel to open it up and go deep inside it, to study its heart and its lungs. In physics, they were working on a Tesla coil. They learned how to connect the components together correctly and to measure amps and volts. For chemistry they use the Virtual Chemistry Lab developed by experts at Carnegie Mellon whose aim was to ‘create learning environments where college and high school students can approach chemistry more like practicing scientists.’
“This week in chemistry they were making aspirins. So they were using different chemical reagents and they had to play around with them to figure out what percentage of each they needed for creating an aspirin.”
Medina contrasts the challenge to make an aspirin with the standard approach where the students sit and listen to a teacher spouting formulas and talking about phenyl salicylate and Erlenmeyer flasks. “Our students set up their Augmented Reality lab on a table. They take a good look at the beakers and flasks and they play around with the reagents and then they say, ‘Chispas! So that’s what happens when I mix these two together.’ And yes, maybe they do blow up the whole lab — it happens — but there’s no harm done and there’s a lot they learn.”
Knotion school students use Augmented Reality to investigate chemistry one day and perhaps go looking around inside the pyramids of Egypt the following day, using x-rays to examine a mummy. They can also study a black hole while sitting in their kitchen, not only looking at it, but figuring out how it works.
“Because of all this, we are not affected by the pandemic,” says Luis Medina. “and we have a long waiting list of parents who want to send their children to us. We’ve done so well that our little college was named an Apple Distinguished School, meaning that it is considered one of the most innovative schools in the world … and, in fact, we were one of three Mexican schools recently invited to participate in a virtual global meeting organized by Apple — and that is something we are really proud of!”
The writer has lived near Guadalajara, Jalisco, for more than 30 years and is the author of A Guide to West Mexico’s Guachimontones and Surrounding Area and co-author of Outdoors in Western Mexico. More of his writing can be found on his website.
